College Still Scares Me

I’m leaving Rapid City to head back to school on Thursday, and if I’m being fully honest with myself, I’m afraid. This may be my fourth go at college, but I still feel nearly as insecure as I did when I walked into my freshman dorm all those months ago.

I’m scared that this is going to be the year when Stanford and all of its students figure out that I am nowhere near qualified enough to be there. I’m scared that my professors will decide that all of their time and energy was wasted on me. I’m scared that my dorm won’t ever feel like home. I’m scared of senioritis. I’m scared that my friendships will have changed so much over the summer that they’ll be unrecognizable. I’m scared I’ll never find a quiet corner to breathe in between classes. I’m scared I’ll be so busy that I won’t notice when the white roses are planted in the med school and the orange tree in front of the post office blooms. I’m scared of wasting my last year. I’m scared of spending it wisely.

I always thought that going back to school would get easier as I got older, and in a lot of ways it has. I know there are people waiting for me at San Francisco International just like there always are at Rapid City Regional. I think of my professors as friends and mentors in a way I never could have when they were just names on a page. I know my roommate well and have many nights watching Jane the Virgin with her to look forward to. So much about going back to school is familiar and loved. I always thought that as that list grew, though, the fears would go away. I’m realizing now that more often that not, my fears have evolved rather than disappeared.

One of my most vivid memories of freshman year occurred during the opening convocation. I had arrived early, in typical Amanda fashion, and had picked a seat at the end of the aisle for a quick escape at the end of the ceremony. Heaven forbid I got stuck in lengthy small talk afterwards with a complete stranger, ya know? I was sitting there for a while before a family walked in and asked how many seats in the aisle I was saving for my own family. I explained that it was just me, so they were welcome to join me in the row. We struck up a conversation, and they asked what my family was up to that prevented them from attending convocation. I explained that I had flown to school by myself, so my parents were doing whatever it was that they usually did on a Tuesday afternoon back in South Dakota. They gave me a look of pity that always seemed unnecessary to me but that I got quite accustomed to whenever I told people I was moving in by myself. And then they told me I was brave.

So so brave.

I don’t really remember much more about commencement. I think somebody sang, and they probably made some joke about how somebody in the audience was a clerical error and had never been accepted to Stanford. Cue the pained laughter while everybody pulled out their phones to look for an un-acceptance email. I spent the rest of the ceremony deep in thought about how delusional somebody would have to be to call a great big ball of fear and insecurity like myself brave. No no, surely they just hadn’t noticed the tear tracks that were still fresh on my face from crying in my dorm room earlier that day. Surely they just couldn’t guess that I was afraid I had been given a classics advisor because Stanford didn’t think I could make it as a biologist. Surely they didn’t see how scared I was of failing my classes, or worse yet not even finding them in the first place because the campus was so dang big and confusing. If they had seen all of that, there’s no way they would have called me brave, right?

Three years hasn’t changed how scared I am going back to school, but it has changed my perspective. As a freshman, I thought that for sure being afraid disqualified me from being brave. As a senior, I realize that the big family with the very Greek last name was right to call me brave because I was sitting there at Stanford University’s commencement in spite of the fact that my fears were fully intact. I was brave because in spite of the fact that I had no clue what was waiting on the other end of the trip, I got on a plane to move halfway across the country. The three intervening years have taught me that bravery isn’t so much an absence of fear as it is a mockery of fear. Bravery is looking fear in the eyes, knees knocking and heart racing, and laughing nonetheless.

Senior year, you have already kept me up at night and brought me to tears, and classes haven’t even started. You scare the living daylights out of me with your unpredictability and ability to set the stage for my future. But on Thursday, I’m getting on a plane, and you are quite simply not frightening enough to talk me out of it.

Let’s Fail Together, Yes?

I posted a reflection on pancakes and failure yesterday on Facebook, hoping for personal catharsis if nothing else. I wrote about how the first pancake never turns out, but that doesn’t mean you should stop making pancakes. My emotions were definitely part disappointment in not getting an offer at a job to which I had recently applied, but surprisingly enough, were also part joy as I realized I was experiencing boldness instead of fear in the face of failure. That was a very new experience for me, a recovering failure phobe, and I needed a space to process. I think I’m supposed to turn to a journal or something to deal with that, but there was a little part of me that knew that this was about more than my own healing. There were other people who needed to hear those words.

I’ve been completely blown away by the response I have received in the last 24 hours to that post. People have sent me pictures of their own first pancakes (literal and metaphorical), texted me to share their experiences with rejection, and responded with their own confession of a fear of failure. I’m not a very emotional person, but I cried reading responses. They were so beautiful and raw, and showed so vividly the scars that perfectionism had left behind. These were people who felt alone in their experience of failure, and craved somebody who was willing to sit with them in the full, complete narrative of their life. More than anything, they made me realize the hunger that we all feel for others to make room for our failures.

We humans are spectacularly good at goofing up, and absolutely horrible at being okay with it. I’m as guilty as any in trying to cover up as quickly as possible the mess that I have in my life, and I’ve come to discover that all of this stems out of a fear of rejection. A fear that if I show my whole self to the people I care about, they won’t care anymore. Coming face to face with my own fear of failure and rejection has forced me to see the same fear in the people around me, and has given me a craving to do something to remove it. No, remove is too weak of a word. I want to completely uproot the lie that worth can be so narrowly defined by acceptance letters, job descriptions, the opinion of others, and every other traditional measure of success that we so easily parade in front of each other. I think that’s what this blog is meant to be here for.

I’m entering a time in my life when I fully expect to have many many failures in close succession, and I want to share those with you. I’m going to be graduating from college in a short ten months, and after that, I have literally no clue what my life is going to look like. Given the trajectory of my life thus far, though, I’m guessing that I am going to mess up a ton along the way. I’m going to apply to graduate schools that won’t accept me and jobs where the person reading my application actually laughs at how absurdly underwhelming it is. I’m going to take classes that are way beyond me and make goals I know well I don’t have the capacity to fulfill. I cannot promise I will do it unflinchingly, but I can promise I will do it boldly.

This blog is, in its own little way, exposure therapy for my fear of failure. I want to fully share with you the failures I will inevitably experience in the coming year, the frustration and disappointment I feel as a result, and I hope, the growth I undergo as a result of stretching myself out of my safe, successful little comfort zone. I want you to know without a doubt that you are not alone in your failures, that I’m here too, and somehow, someway, we’re gonna make it through this.